This Little Amsterdam Improv Club launched great American careers

Seth Meyers had no idea what to expect when he got a job in 1997 at a young comedy club in Amsterdam called Boom Chicago. He was in his early twenties and had never traveled outside the United States. He had to apply for a passport.

“I knew nothing about the Netherlands at all,” he said in a recent interview. “My first thought was to buy good hiking boots, probably because I thought I was going to Switzerland. And then I literally hit the flattest place I’ve ever lived.

Meyers didn’t get very hungry, but he did do a lot of comedy practice, put on improv shows four or five nights a week, and tried out tons of material in front of a live, and often skeptical, Dutch audience.

The club, which now has its own theater in the center of Amsterdam, is still what it was in the beginning: a venue for a two-hour improvisation and sketch comedy show by five artists performing comedic games and stunts based on suggestions from public. . Cast members make up scenes and songs on the spot, asking the audience for names or words to which they riff and build a screenplay.

Boom founders Andrew Moskos and Pep Rosenfeld met in elementary school in Evanston, Illinois, and both attended Northwestern University. As aspiring comedians, they were in the right place at the right time: Chicago in the 1980s.

They attended late night improv sets at the famed Second City club – where Joan Rivers, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert had all launched their careers – and took many improv classes and got on stage as much as possible.

But improvising in Chicago wasn’t paying the rent, Moskos said. In 1992, the duo traveled to Amsterdam, where, as many young tourists do, they visited a “coffee shop,” one of the city’s legal marijuana cafes. “We had one of the best stoner ideas ever, which was to quit our job in America and start a comedy club here,” Moskos recalls.

The idea didn’t go away with the hangover. When they got home, they wrote a letter with a business plan to the municipality of Amsterdam. The answer came almost immediately, sent by fax.

“Your idea doesn’t work,” wrote a city clerk. “The Dutch don’t want to see a show in English and tourists don’t want to see a show at all. You need a subsidy to make theater in the Netherlands, but you will not receive a subsidy. Think twice about your plans.”

They kept the fax, which is now framed, thought twice and decided to do it anyway, Moskos said.

However, they could not have gone any further without meeting Saskia Maas, an Amsterdam native who acted as a contact person, translator and business partner. She and Moskos fell in love and got married; she, Moskos and Rosenfeld are the co-owners of Boom Chicago.

They held their first auditions for the Chicago club’s performers and promised full-time paid employment. Meyers tried it out with his friend, Peter Grosz, who later won an Emmy for writing “The Colbert Report.”

Meyers and Grosz were both accepted and they shared an apartment in Amsterdam with Allison Silverman, who would later become an Emmy-winning comedy writer for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.” Another cast member at the time was Jordan Peele, who later became a star of ‘MADtv’ and won an Oscar for the original screenplay for his movie ‘Get Out’.

“We had to be on stage four or five nights a week, and that never happened for us in Chicago,” said Meyers, “Also, we had to be in Amsterdam in our early twenties, surrounded by all these other talented people.”

Ruffin first joined the cast in 2004 and performed with it through 2011. “It was the perfect place for a youngster to learn – the perfect mix of partying and then having to perform.”

Performing for a Dutch audience produces a high comedy bar, explains Meyers. “They don’t give it away for free, Dutch people,” he added. “There’s not really a language barrier, but I just think they’re demanding. I have a great affection for the audience I had there because it was the most real bounce you would ever get.

Hunt, the “Ted Lasso” co-creator, who worked at Boom Chicago from 1999 to 2005, said that “working constantly” helped him forget about the harsh public. “In Chicago, if you have a bad show, you have to wait a week to get the taste of it out of your mouth,” he said. “At Boom you have another show the next evening.”

It was during these years that the seeds for “Ted Lasso” were also planted, he added. Jason Sudeikis overlapped with Hunt at Boom Chicago for six months in 2000, and the two remained close after that. Because it was difficult to follow American sports from abroad during those years, Hunt said, he began watching football and eventually became “a zealot” for the game.

Hunt and Sudeikis came up with the concept for “Ted Lasso” – an upstanding American football coach who accepts an offer to manage a British “soccer” team, knowing little about football – who has now won four Emmys. As a tribute to their time at Boom, Hunt said, he and Sudeikis set an episode of Season 3 in Amsterdam, using their fondness for the city to avoid clichéd pitfalls.

At the end of the episode, Hunt’s character, Coach Beard, emerges from a van in a 1970s David Bowie costume and with a fake pig snout – “Piggy Stardust” – and speaks Dutch, a skill that Hunt also has. picked up in Boom Chicago.

Hunt and Meyers both return to Amsterdam next month for sold-out solo shows at the Boom Chicago Comedy Festival, a two-week festival of improvisation, stand-up, variety shows and cabaret in both Dutch and English from July 5 through July 16. It’s a victory lap of sorts.

“The hardest thing about returning to Amsterdam is how nostalgic it makes me,” said Meyers, who will perform at the festival on July 6. “It’s just painfully sad how much I miss that time there,” he added. “It felt like a time of ascension, not just for me but for everyone around me. It felt like something really special that we were doing.”